Public Services Summit 2010: Anticipating the challenges ahead

One thing is for sure: none of the public managers who attended this year's Guardian Public Services Summit could be in any doubt that change is on the way for the sector. The two-day conference, which took place in Hertfordshire at the end of last week, was notable for looking both backwards and to the future. Leaders and thinkers summed up many of the of the key aspects of the past 12 and a bit years of running public services under the Labour government, and attempted to anticipate some of the challenges that will face them in the coming years. Sir Michael Bichard, director of the Institute for Government and a former permanent secretary with considerable influence inside Whitehall, summed up the mood of many when he said, introducing a session looking at resistance to change in the public sector, that there has already been "fantastic change" in the public sector. Following Bichard to the speakers' podium, Professor Christopher Hood, director of the Economic and Social Research Council's research programme, agreed that what we need now is a grown-up debate, focusing on which kinds of change and innovation different organisations are best at doing. So far, then, the conference agreed on the need for change, as long as the debate was framed in the right way - and as long as change, particularly cultural change in organisations, was handled skillfully and not in what one speaker described as "an unnecessarily confrontational way". A strong reminder of why change is still needed in the way public services are delivered came from Craig Dearden-Phillips, chief executive of the charity Speaking Up, who told delegates that despite discussion of more joined up services, from the point of view of the disabled people with whom he works, very little has changed and it is still a struggle to deal with the many different arms of the state, a point reinforced by another speaker at the conference, Charles Leadbeater, founder of the public service design agency Participle. Describing the work of his organisation with families in need, Leadbeater, too, put forward a view of public services that was far from joined up: "It wasn't that these people weren't getting services," he said, "but that the services came in and out and added to the chaos." The international and local focus was on budget cuts Add to this the view from the politicians at the conference, who from both an international and a local focus emphasised the need for budget cuts, and a truly gloomy picture might be thought to have emerged. In fact, the converse was true. It is clear that public sector leaders and those in the voluntary sector, as well as social entrepreneurs, may not be relishing the crisis, but certainly see the need for real leadership in difficult times and are ready to rise to the challenge. The idea of not wasting a good crisis was heard around the conference floor more than once. Above all, the summit is a place to exchange and hone ideas. As Stephen Bubb, the chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, says on his blog , this is a place to gain good ideas. Bubb writes: "The range of top speakers and thinkers on public service is astonishing. The debates are superb and I rarely leave without new ideas for action (my staff just love that!)". For more coverage see today's Guardian Society